>FWIW I just tried Ping and Clonezilla. It looked like Ping only dealt
>with (partitions but probably does drives as well but didn't play that
>long)

Ping copies all ticked partitions - if you tick all partitions you get a
clone of the drive :) I've only used it in cloning to/from a system image
rather than immediate disk-to-disk cloning, admittedly, but I'd imaging
it would be the same. I might look at some of the other suggestions in
the thread though to see if their UI is better for less techy people.

>In article <4f45i4piv5k27hkijeocso2lmmtmc783mr(a)4ax.com>,
>T i m <news(a)spaced.me.uk> wrote:
>>Hi all,
>>
>>Is there a (ideally free) util that would work like Ghost to allow me
>>to clone one drive onto another from a Live CD of some sort please?

>I'm using ping, Partimage Is Not Ghost - http://ping.windowsdream.com/

That is a totally idiotic name for it. There already is a program called
ping which does something entirely different. Naming two things with the
same name is stupid.

>to backup and clone disks. Not the most polished front end but seems
>to work well for the small number of configs I've used it in so far.

I would not trust anyone who named his program for a well known utility. It
indicates shear irrespoinsibility or ignorance, neither of which are
conducive to trusting him to write decent software.

>I'm not sure how well it copes with LVM mind you, the support forums are
>full of homebrew scripts to cater for LVM. I found that to restore a
>non-LVM disk onto one which had had LVM, I needed to run the util twice
>as it didn't correctly remove the LVM PV's. As far as I could work out
>the problem, the first clone overwrote the partition table but appeared
>to believe the devices were in use, until I rebooted the live CD when
>the second clone restored the data to the now non-LVM target disk !

>T i m wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Is there a (ideally free) util that would work like Ghost to allow me
>> to clone one drive onto another from a Live CD of some sort please?
>>
>> Or if I would have to install it, something that would run under
>> Ubuntu (8.1)?
>>
>> Cheers, T i m
>
>Depending on the drive make, some manufacturers offer a bootable CD ISO
>that does exactly that. Seagate do for one.

> A 'dd' copy of the disk will do a block by block copy of the disk
> regardless of any filesystem errors. You can then use the copy on a
> working drive to try and recover the data without doing more damage.

This may be a silly question, but does dd also copy the MBR? If so
could that by itself be used to clone a disk?

--
Will J G

From: chris on 19 Nov 2008 05:38
Folderol wrote:> On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:02:38 +0000
> chris <ithinkiam(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A 'dd' copy of the disk will do a block by block copy of the disk
>> regardless of any filesystem errors. You can then use the copy on a
>> working drive to try and recover the data without doing more damage.
>
> This may be a silly question, but does dd also copy the MBR? If so
> could that by itself be used to clone a disk?

AFAIK, yes. The downside of dd versus partition cloners is that it
copies even 'unused' space. So if you've got a 60gig disk with, say,
30gig used you'll get a 60gig dd copy, but a 30gig clone (less with
compression). Plus, using the dd copy requires fiddling with partition
tables in order to use it on a new disk, whereas the you can copy the
clone onto a pre-existing filesystem.

I'm no expert, but AIUI the difference is that the cloners work at the
filesystem level and therefore are susceptible to fs errors, whereas dd
works at a lower level and will ignore fs errors (it is susceptible to
low level errors, though).